The Economic Assimilation of Irish Famine Migrants to the United States William J. Collins and Ariell Zimran February 2019 the R
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The Economic Assimilation of Irish Famine Migrants to the United States William J. Collins and Ariell Zimran February 2019 The repeated failure of Ireland's potato crop in the late 1840s led to a major famine and sparked a surge in migration to the US. We build a new dataset of Irish immigrants and their sons by linking males from 1850 to 1880 US census records. For comparison, we also link German and British immigrants, their sons, and males from US native-headed households. We document a decline in the observable human capital of famine-era Irish migrants compared to pre-famine Irish migrants and to other groups in the 1850 census, as well as worse labor market outcomes. The disparity in labor market outcomes persists into the next generation when immigrants’ and natives’ sons are compared in 1880. Nonetheless, we find strong evidence of intergenerational convergence in that famine-era Irish sons experienced a much smaller gap in occupational status in 1880 than their fathers did in 1850. The disparities are even smaller when the Irish children are compared to those from observationally similar native white households. A descriptive analysis of mobility for the children of the famine Irish indicates that having a more Catholic surname and being born in Ireland were associated with less upward mobility. Our results contribute to literatures on immigrant assimilation, refugee migration, and the Age of Mass Migration. JEL: F22, J61, J62, N31, O15 Keywords: Migration, Refugees, Assimilation, Intergenerational Mobility, Irish Famine Contact: [email protected]; [email protected] The authors thank Joseph Ferrie, Tim Hatton, Nick Holtkamp, Joel Mokyr, Cormac Ó Gráda, Marianne Wanamaker; seminar participants at Auburn University, UCLA, the University of Minnesota, Vanderbilt University, and William & Mary; and conference participants at the 2019 ASSA Meeting for helpful suggestions. Claire Whittaker provided excellent research assistance. Collins is the Terence E. Adderley Jr. Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University and a Research Associate of the NBER. Zimran is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University and a Faculty Research Fellow of the NBER. 1. Introduction Ireland’s Great Famine in the late 1840s marked a turning point in the country’s demographic and economic history. In 1841, the population numbered just over 8 million; it is estimated that the famine caused the death of about one million Irish and drove another million to emigrate by the early 1850s (Ó Gráda 1999, chapter 3).1 Most of the Irish emigrants settled in the United States, where virtually open borders gave sanctuary from the horrors of starvation and disease (Ó Gráda 2019). The US ultimately absorbed over 500,000 new arrivals from Ireland between the famine’s onset in 1846 and 1850 (Ferenczi and Wilcox 1929; Barde, Carter, and Sutch 2006).2 This paper picks up the emigrants’ story on American shores and builds new datasets to study their and their children’s labor market outcomes in comparison to those of US natives and immigrants from other countries. Irish migration to the US had been growing since the 1830s as part of a general rise in transatlantic migration (Mokyr and Ó Gráda 1982; Ó Gráda 1983; Cohn 2009); but the sharp increase in arrivals during the famine dwarfed previous arrival cohorts. The unprecedentedly large stream of arrivals induced by the famine marked the start of the “Age of Mass Migration,” and likely comprised the largest group of refugees from a single source that the US has ever absorbed relative to the size of its population.3 This change in the volume of Irish immigrants coincided with an apparent change in their characteristics relative to earlier, more prosperous Irish immigrants (Handlin 1991 [1941] p. 51; Miller 1985 p. 295; Anbinder 1992, p. 7), and exacerbated the view of many Americans at the time that the Irish migrants’ relative poverty, tendency to live near one another, and predominantly Catholic religion were barriers to their assimilation and, therefore, justified restrictions on immigration and immigrants’ rights (Anbinder 1992; Hirota 2017). Such concerns have resurfaced throughout US history in response to the arrival of poor or culturally “different” immigrants. In this case, the nativist response was severe, culminating in the political ascent of the “Know Nothings” (Anbinder 1992; Alsan, Eriksson, and Niemesh 2019). This paper studies the economic status and labor market assimilation of the famine-era Irish immigrants, with a particular focus on the adult labor market outcomes of the immigrants’ children. Although the group’s size and historical prominence makes them particularly interesting to study, 1 Ó Gráda (1999, ch. 3) discusses the dating of the famine and the challenges of quantifying deaths and emigration. 2 Cohn (2009, pp. 26-27) describes difficulties in determining the number of Irish immigrants from official US immigration statistics before 1850. 3 For perspective, refugees and asylees granted permanent resident status under the Displaced Persons Act (1948) averaged about 118,000 per year from 1950-52, at the program’s peak (Barde, Carter, and Sutch 2006, p. 1-632); the Mariel Boatlift entailed approximately 125,000 Cuban migrants in 1980 (Card 1990, p. 245). 1 data constraints have made it difficult to do so. To overcome these constraints, we constructed a new micro-level dataset by linking males born in Ireland, Germany, Britain, and the US from the 1850 to the 1880 complete-count US censuses.4 The linked dataset is large, national in scope, and conservatively constructed to reduce false matches. It includes household heads and their sons; therefore, it allows us to compare labor market outcomes for immigrant and native groups over two generations, and to consider the second generation’s labor market outcomes in light of variation in their early life circumstances. Moreover, the new dataset’s panel structure helps us to avoid biases from cohort quality changes and selective return migration that confound inferences from cross- sectional census data (Lubotsky 2007; Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2014). That is, because we follow a fixed set of men over time, there are no changes in sample composition. The inclusion of German and British immigrants, who comprised the next largest groups of immigrants in this period, allows for useful comparisons across arrival cohorts and across immigrant groups, which in turn helps illustrate the distinctiveness of the famine-era Irish. The children’s economic outcomes are especially interesting in the context of concerns about the long-run assimilation of new immigrant groups. Immigrants’ children’s outcomes have garnered considerable attention in the literature on the economics of migration (e.g., Borjas 1992, 1993; Card, DiNardo, and Estes 2000; Card 2005; Caponi 2011; Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2014; Alexander and Ward 2018). But to our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the children of the large cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century US, at the start of the Age of Mass Migration. This is also one of a small number of papers that address long-run patterns of economic assimilation by refugee immigrants or their children, whose experiences and outcomes may differ from those of other migrant groups (Edin, Fredriksson, and Åslund 2003; Cortes 2004; Beaman 2012; Evans and Fitzgerald 2017).5 Our focus on the immigrants’ children is also a practical consequence of the historical census data’s limitations. The censuses of this era did not inquire directly about each immigrant’s year of arrival. This poses a major challenge to discerning between those who arrived before or after the Irish famine’s onset and, in general, to any study of immigrant assimilation in this early period.6 4 Linking females from childhood to adulthood is difficult due to name changes at marriage. 5 We use the term “refugee” here because a large number of the Irish migrants were permanently driven from home by a severe ecological disaster and ensuing economic and social dislocation in the late 1840s. The modern literature focuses on refugees that meet a particular legal definition established in the postwar period; see Hatton (2012) for a brief review. 6 One reason much of the recent literature on the Age of Mass Migration focuses on the early twentieth century is that the census microdata report year of immigration starting in 1900. Before 1850, the census did not 2 Nonetheless, in 1850, we can determine the arrival cohort for many household heads by examining their children’s birth year and birth place information.7 This approach definitively categorizes the household head’s arrival cohort (“pre-famine” or “famine-era”) for about two-thirds of the sons of Irish immigrants.8 The relatively high classification rate makes studying the children’s outcomes attractive—we know whether their household head arrived before or during the famine, observe their childhood household characteristics in 1850 in detail, and then see their labor market outcomes as prime-aged adult workers in 1880. In addition, the “classified” set of children is fairly representative of all immigrants’ children circa 1850 in terms of observable characteristics. We use the new dataset to address three main sets of questions. First, in 1850, how different were the households headed by famine-era Irish migrants from those headed by earlier Irish migrants, by concurrent migrants from Germany and Britain, and by US natives? In particular, is there evidence of a differential change in Irish household heads’ human capital (reflecting changing selection) and labor market outcomes (reflecting both selection and labor market conditions for newly arrived migrants) between the pre-famine and famine-era migrants? Given this paper’s motivation, we care about changing migrant selection primarily because it directly influences the average household characteristics and resources of immigrants’ children, though documenting the patterns of migrant selection at the time of the famine is also of independent interest (e.g., Mokyr and Ó Gráda 1982; Cohn 1995).